Kansas City Mafia
The Kansas City crime family, also known as the Civella crime family or Kansas City Mafia, is an Italian-American Mafia family based in Kansas City, Missouri. History Early history The Italian-American organized crime family began when two Sicilian ''mafiosi'' known as the DiGiovanni brothers fled Sicily to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1912. Joseph "Joe Church" DiGiovanni and Peter "Sugarhouse Pete" DiGiovanni began making money from a variety of criminal operations or rackets shortly after their arrival. Their fortunes greatly improved with the introduction of Prohibition, when they became the only group bootlegging alcohol in Kansas City. Their rackets at this time were controlled by John Lazia, who later became the leading figure when the organisation expanded. The gang was given virtually a free hand to operate by their boss Tom Pendergast, head of the Pendergast Machine that controlled Kansas City's government at the time. Under Pendergast, Kansas City became a wide-open to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City (abbreviated KC or KCMO) is the largest city in Missouri by population and area. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 508,090 in 2020, making it the 36th most-populous city in the United States. It is the central city of the Kansas City metropolitan area, which straddles the Missouri–Kansas state line and has a population of 2,392,035. Most of the city lies within Jackson County, with portions spilling into Clay, Cass, and Platte counties. Kansas City was founded in the 1830s as a port on the Missouri River at its confluence with the Kansas River coming in from the west. On June 1, 1850, the town of Kansas was incorporated; shortly after came the establishment of the Kansas Territory. Confusion between the two ensued, and the name Kansas City was assigned to distinguish them soon after. Sitting on Missouri's western boundary with Kansas, with Downtown near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, the city encompasses about , making ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sicily
(man) it, Siciliana (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = Ethnicity , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = Sicilian , demographics1_info1 = 98% , demographics1_title2 = , demographics1_info2 = , demographics1_title3 = , demographics1_info3 = , timezone1 = CET , utc_offset1 = +1 , timezone1_DST = CEST , utc_offset1_DST = +2 , postal_code_type = , postal_code = , area_code_type = ISO 3166 code , area_code = IT-82 , blank_name_sec1 = GDP (nominal) , blank_info_sec1 = €89.2 billion (2018) , blank1_name_sec1 = GDP per capita , blank1_info_sec1 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Nicholas Civella
Nicholas Civella (born Giuseppe Nicoli Civella; March 19, 1912 – March 12, 1983) was an American mobster who became a prominent leader of the Kansas City crime family. Early life Civella was born to Italian immigrants in Kansas City. He was the younger brother of mobster Carl "Cork" Civella and the uncle of mobster Anthony Civella. Nicholas Civella began his criminal career as a teenager in the Italian "Northeast" neighborhood of Kansas City. Civella's first arrest was at age 10, after which he dropped out of school. Before he reached age 20, Civella had been arrested for auto theft, illegal gambling, robbery, and vagrancy. In 1932, Civella spent two months in prison for bootlegging. In 1934 Civella married Katherine, his wife for almost fifty years. He had no children of his own. In the early 1940s, Civella became a Democratic Party precinct worker on the North Side of Kansas City and became friends with Kansas City crime boss, Charles Binaggio. Rise to power By the 1950s, C ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Anthony Gizzo
Anthony Robert Gizzo (August 4, 1902 – April 1, 1953) was a Kansas City, Missouri mobster with the Cosa Nostra and a boss of the Kansas City crime family. Gizzo was born in New York City and was known as "Tony". In the early 1920s, after being arrested on a narcotics charge, Gizzo attempted to bribe a federal officer with $10,000 ($ today). Gizzo was convicted and in 1924 served one year and a day at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. Gizzo was a close friend of mobster Charles Binaggio. In 1930, Gizzo and Binaggio were arrested in Denver, Colorado, on a minor charge. During this time, both men were lieutenants to Kansas City North End political boss John Lazia in his illegal gambling operations. Gizzo soon became known as one of the five "Iron Men" due to his underworld clout. In 1950, with Binaggio's murder, it is believed that Gizzo assumed leadership of the Kansas City family. Kefauver Committee Gizzo testified in Kansas City before the U.S. Senate ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Forrest Smith
Forrest Smith (February 14, 1886 – March 8, 1962) was an American politician who served as the 42nd governor of Missouri. He was a Democrat. Personal life Forrest Smith was born February 14, 1886, near Hardin in Ray County, Missouri. After receiving his secondary education at Woodson Institute in Richmond, Missouri, Smith attended Westminster College. On October 12, 1915, he married Mildred Williams and they were the parents of two daughters, Forrestine and Mary Josephine. Smith was a Methodist. Career Forrest Smith began his lifelong political career in 1910 when he became deputy assessor for Ray County, Missouri. In 1914 he was elected county clerk for Ray County, a post he held for the next eight years. From 1925 to 1932 Smith served on the Missouri state tax commission, a post that laid the groundwork for a long career in statewide elected office. In 1932 Forrest Smith was elected Missouri state auditor, a post he would hold for the next sixteen years until being elect ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Racketeering
Racketeering is a type of organized crime in which the perpetrators set up a coercive, fraudulent, extortionary, or otherwise illegal coordinated scheme or operation (a "racket") to repeatedly or consistently collect a profit. Originally and often still specifically, racketeering may refer to an organized criminal act in which the perpetrators offer a service that will not be put into effect, offer a service to solve a nonexistent problem, or offer a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. However, racketeers may offer an ostensibly effectual service to solve an existing problem. The traditional and historically most common example of such a racket is the "protection racket", in which racketeers offer to protect a business from robbery or vandalism; however, the racketeers will themselves coerce or threaten the business into accepting this service, often with the threat (implicit or otherwise) that failure to acquire the offered services will lead t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Charles Binaggio
Charles Binaggio (January 12, 1909 - April 6, 1950) was an American gangster who became the boss of the Kansas City crime family and concocted a bold plan to control the police forces in Kansas City, Missouri and St. Louis, Missouri. Early life Born in Beaumont, Texas, Binaggio moved with his family to Kansas City, Missouri, at an early age. Binaggio grew up in the city's North Side, which was then heavily populated by Sicilian and Italian immigrants. It isn't known when first Binaggio fell in with the mob; when he did join them, he rose quietly to prominence. In December 1930, in Denver, Colorado, Binaggio was arrested for the first time at age 21. The police raided a Denver apartment that Binaggio shared with Anthony Gizzo and Tony Casciola, two well-known Kansas City Mafiosi. Searching the apartment, police found a mini-cache of firearms and charged the three with weapons violations. The charges were later reduced to vagrancy and Binaggio was released on bond. As it turns o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Tax Evasion
Tax evasion is an illegal attempt to defeat the imposition of taxes by individuals, corporations, trusts, and others. Tax evasion often entails the deliberate misrepresentation of the taxpayer's affairs to the tax authorities to reduce the taxpayer's tax liability, and it includes dishonest tax reporting, declaring less income, profits or gains than the amounts actually earned, overstating deductions, using bribes against authorities in countries with high corruption rates and hiding money in secret locations. Tax evasion is an activity commonly associated with the informal economy. One measure of the extent of tax evasion (the "tax gap") is the amount of unreported income, which is the difference between the amount of income that should be reported to the tax authorities and the actual amount reported. In contrast, tax avoidance is the legal use of tax laws to reduce one's tax burden. Both tax evasion and tax avoidance can be viewed as forms of tax noncompliance, as they desc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Charles Carrollo
Charles Vincent "Charlie the Wop" Carrollo (born Vincenzo Carrollo; August 25, 1902 – 1979) was an Italian-born Kansas City, Missouri crime boss during the 1930s. Carrollo was born in Santa Cristina Gela, an Arbëreshë town in the province of Palermo, Sicily, and immigrated with his family to the United States when he was three years old, initially settling in New York City before moving to Kansas City. His father was Antonio Carrollo and his mother Rosa Maria Carrollo. At some time after 1917, Carrollo became a close friend and enforcer for future Kansas City mob boss John Lazia. During the early 1920s, when Lazia was arrested for bootlegging, Carrollo accepted responsibility for the crime and went to prison for a short time. By the late 1920s, Lazia controlled all organized crime in Kansas City and Carrollo was a top lieutenant. On the night of July 10, 1934, Carrollo drove Lazia and his wife Marie to their apartment building. When Lazia got out of the car, an unidentified ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Underboss
Underboss ( it, sottocapo) is a position within the leadership structure of certain organized crime groups, particularly in Sicilian, Greek, and Italian-American Mafia crime families. The underboss is second in command to the boss. The underboss is sometimes a family member, such as a son, who will take over the family if the boss is sick, killed, or imprisoned. However the position of street boss has somewhat challenged the rank of underboss in the modern era. The position was installed within the Genovese crime family since at least the mid-1960s. It has also been used in the Detroit crime family and the Chicago Outfit. The power of an underboss greatly varies; some are marginal figures, while others are the most powerful individual in the family. Traditionally they run day-to-day affairs of the family. In some crime families, the appointment is for life. If a new boss takes over a family with an existing underboss, that boss may marginalize or even murder the underboss appo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Tom Pendergast
Thomas Joseph Pendergast (July 22, 1872 – January 26, 1945), also known as T. J. Pendergast, was an American political boss who controlled Kansas City and Jackson County, Missouri, from 1925 to 1939. Pendergast only briefly held elected office, as an alderman, but his capacity as chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Party allowed him to use his large network of Irish family and friends to help the election of politicians, in some cases by voter fraud, and to hand out government contracts and patronage jobs. He became wealthy in the process, but his addiction to gambling, especially horse racing, later led to a large accumulation of personal debts. In 1939, he was convicted of income tax evasion and served 15 months in a federal prison. The Pendergast organization helped to launch the political career of future president Harry S. Truman, which caused Truman's early enemies to dub him "the senator from Pendergast". Early years Thomas Joseph Pendergast, also known to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Boss (crime)
A crime boss, also known as a crime lord, Don, gang lord, gang boss, mob boss, kingpin, godfather, crime mentor or criminal mastermind, is a person in charge of a criminal organization. Description A crime boss typically has absolute or nearly absolute control over the other members of the organization and is often greatly feared or respected for their cunning, strategy, and/or ruthlessness and willingness to take lives to exert their influence and profits from the criminal endeavors in which the organization engages.Manning, George A. ''Financial Investigation and Forensic Accounting.'' Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2005. Some groups may only have as little as two ranks (a crime boss and their soldiers). Other groups have a more complex, structured organization with many ranks, and structure may vary with cultural background. Organized crime enterprises originating in Sicily differ in structure from those in mainland Italy. American groups may be structured differently from ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |